A Little Bit of Hansie

Hansie is the dearest boy. He says and does the best things. Look at him here--diligently reading the tiny Book of Mormon Mike gave him during sacrament meeting:

The other day he told me that drawing was one of the things he liked to do during his "leisure time". Leisure time? Haha. I love him:

He also said this recently: "The main reason I'm the tallest person in my class is because I don't drink Mountain Dew. Because every time you drink caffeine you get a little smaller."

And, after Mike helped Daisy get her new (very old) car running and Jesse said, "Daisy, now you have to baptize your car!" (referring to driving it at over 100 mph--which I do not allow), Hans matter-of-factly stated, "But first you have to seal it to the family." (Looks like we might be stuck with that Buick ... forever.)

Also, when we were discussing how we will need to get the neighbor who runs cows on the farm to relocate them so we can tear the fence out, Hans said, "We should just be able to keep Rod Curtis's cows. We deserve them anyway!" I'm not exactly sure how we deserve them, but he's probably right. 

Anyway, I just really like that kid so much. He's a small delight. And that is all.

Horse Buggy, Goat Pens, Sickness, and Almost Easter

Friday after school one of Jesse's Priests' Quorum leaders picked him up for an activity ... in this:

And then they spent several hours breaking up concrete with sledgehammers for the bishop.

Did I mention they made knives earlier in the week? And spent an evening last month packaging meat in a ward member's backyard meat packing establishment??

We're not in Kansas anymore, kids. (Or perhaps that's exactly where we are.) 

In other news, Mike was having trouble finding the breed of pig he wanted to get for the kids to raise for the fair, so they decided on goats. (Ah goats! Have you compared the smell of their pens to the smell of pig pens? It's enough to make you love them.)

This morning we went to the farm to measure some things to get their pen ready. (This granary/goat shelter? was from Mike's Uncle Jodie.)

Then we went to IFA to buy all the supplies. (And to get some farm overalls for me and, for the kids who needed them, some muck boots [rain boots, but, you know, for mucking around].)

And then Anders and I had a special appointment set to go to the temple together to do baptisms for the dead! Just the two of us! For some distant relatives I'd felt a miraculous hand in connecting with!

But instead, Anders began feeling violently ill and started throwing up as we drove back from IFA. So I took him home and spent the next few hours cleaning up repeated bouts of throw up and diarrhea while the others went back to work on goat stuff at the farm. 

And if that's not just how life goes then I don't know what is. 

My sisters and I had been texting a bit about our Easter weekends. Happy things. Kids in town. Vacations. New grandbabies. New goats. Accomplishments of children. Cheery photos of all these moments. And all those things were real. But also ... cleaning up my bathroom for 45 minutes from a violently ill child when I'd hoped to be at the temple was real. 

As I was telling one of my teens the other day (in regard to things far more complex than throw up): life is messy. It isn't tidy and simple. We make really awful mistakes. People we love do. We harm each other. We have hard hard things happen to us. It's fallen mortality. And amazing things and really really complicated and painful stuff exist all mingled together. 

But, though I might have liked Easter weekend to have only been the joyous things my sisters and I were sharing, the real reason I celebrate Easter is that I wholly trust a God who turns all of this mess to good in us and for us, who lets us become full of character and compassion and hope through the failures and the painful, and who has already paved the path for every bit of it to be mended and healed and overcome. All of it. I'm sure of that. That's just how great He is. And how much power He has. And how much He understands. And how much He loves us and knows how to guide us through. And I am so so glad that He is who I have yoked myself to and can depend on and get to even try and be a servant for. I love him so SO much. And perhaps, no, certainly, without all this complex and hard and painful and impossibly messy, I would never ever have known how great my Savior truly is, or how much I truly love Him, or how lucky I am to know He is who I follow and who I get to rely on and hope in.

"And the Lord gave them rest round about. ... There failed not ought of any good thing which the Lord had spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass."

We Sold the House

Our Pleasant View house is sold. (That probably deserved an exclamation mark, but I'm pretty tired.)

(Mike texted the above photo last week with the words "last farewell". Definitely one of those long, drawn-out farewells.)

It really was an exhausting and wild thing selling that house. Not just the moving twelve people and fifteen years' worth of living out of it, and not just the cleaning and patching and painting and fixing either. Though those things would have been plenty--even if it had sold right away. But it did not sell right away. It was on the market for nearly six months (we paid rent up here while making our house payment down there for eight months). And it's hard to pinpoint why on earth it wouldn't sell! It's a lovely home. No horrendously outdated things to it. No major things wrong with it. We priced it well. (One realtor mentioned that we were priced the lowest per square footage in the area). And it had plenty of interest even. In fact, we had fifty showings. (You read that right. FIFTY. Can you imagine if we'd been living there still and I'd had to get it spotless and everyone out of the house for an hour fifty times?) We had seven offers. SEVEN offers! They would come in clusters--so we would accept one of three offers or one of two offers and then ... something would fall through on their end, or they'd bow out before some technical thing was signed on the contract. We had one offer that fell through the very week we were supposed to close on the house (though they did end up being the ones that eventually did buy our house). 

I did see an article not long ago saying that home sells were the worst in the US they'd been in 30 years. We happened to be selling right at a time when interest rates were high and home prices soaring. Still ... I don't know if any of those factors can account for the craziness of offers and showings and nothing ever working for so long. It was just pure madness. And tremendously stressful. And such a relief to finally have it done.

And now ...

There are still a lot of steps, but we can hopefully begin moving in earnest towards creating a new home for our family! (And that does get an exclamation mark.)